The building of Gunn Ranch Academy one caliche rock at a time; our friends, family, passions, learning adventures and our little piece of HIStory in the making!

2009 Schoolhouse Planner

Greetings to my homeschool friends, and welcome back for another great year of Homeschool Crew Reviews!! First product on the agenda for the year is the "bigger and better" 2009 Schoolhouse Planner, with over 40 all-new forms.

As my living situation is still in a complete state of disorganization (aka: CHAOS), this planner has brought a glimpse of hope into my upcoming months of diggin out from under the clutter of moving and organizing a new home just as a new school year should be kicking off. This process actually needs to begin with evaluating what we have hanging, and where we left off when we began our journey into "Building 101". Such a tornado of subjects and notebooks, pencils and crayons; what "grade" are my students in? We need to start PreK and Jr. High too? What have we accomplished, where do we hope to go?

AWWWWW!!!! Where to even begin?

The answer? Ooooo, ooooo I got this one: The Schoolhouse Planner!

Just as I was thinking about what would be helpful from my 2008 Schoolhouse Planner and getting motivated to open it up, God (and Heidi) laid this little puppy right in my lap.

After downloading the file and saving it to my desktop for easy access, I excitedly opened it up to browse the table of contents. I scrolled through the 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 calenders ( finding my birthday each year) then on to type birthdays into the calendar pages which open to cover two full pages. Important things first, you know.

This is when I realized…wow, July is almost here!

I found after each monthly calendar page, articles by some of my favorite homeschool personalities such as Michelle Miller, Steve Demme, Dr. Jay Wile, Molly Green, Amanda Bennett, and Terri Johnson, as well as some wonderful folks I wasn’t familiar with that added to the great subject-related sections here.

As with the previous year’s planner, the recipes and useful help charts and Schoolhouse store resource list are definitely a plus.

Starting on page 118 of this 375 page meaty planner is a section called "Miscellaneous Educational Information", which puts charts of useful information you might need right at your fingertips such as countries and capitals, kitchen conversions cheat sheet, measurement conversions, periodic table of elements, United States and capitals, U.S. Presidents and important documents, and many others.

On page 141 begins Homeschool Forms, and an amazing journey into absolutely any helpful form you need to plan your year, future years, and even take care of those high schoolers. There are things here I hadn’t even thought of, and I was just thrilled with the ease of use. So easy just to type right in names and dates and subjects and basically anything one might need to plan and implement homeschooling from PreK right through High School.

Included are curriculum pages to record specifics, text name, publisher, grade level and thoughts; educational objective sheets, end of year evaluation forms, report cards, and yearly grades, and so much more!

One of my favorite parts is the high school transcript section which I have been really wanting to take a look at with my oldest seeming to grow up so quickly. While she is only 12 this year and technically only "7th/8th grade", I have been wanting to begin my preparation for the high school years since she has already completed a few higher level courses to which I could actually assign "credits". The transcript and high school credit tracking logs as well as a few pages in between will be invaluable as we begin our journey into the junior high and high school years. These are truly better than anything I imagined I could find when looking for ways to record our journey. I must include a thank you to Heidi here for lacing this planner with such a pot of gold!!

On the other end of the spectrum is a DELIGHTFUL section labeled "Preschool activity box" which includes activities that will keep Mr. Busy Levi occupied, as well as prechool planner pages and educational activities for preschoolers that can be checked and dated when concepts are completed. This was another thing I had planned to create this year, and I was so grateful to find exactly what I need here in such an easy-to-use format contributed by our Crew’s Jolanthe whom has become my preschool mentor. Thanks Jolanthe .

Moving on, I was ever-so- happy to find a teaching supplies and inventory list which will certainly help organize our chaos and make sure we have what we need to get started in our new home.

So much here, it’s hard to mention it all, but I promise that anything you need (or didn’t know you needed) is in this planner!

The final section,"Household Forms", beginning on page 263, is a great finale to this unbelievable project. Might I just say it’s exhaustingly complete from important contact phone numbers, to monthly home keeping reminders, car maintenance schedule to menu planners, chore charts to budget planner, Christmas lists to prayer journal, garden planning checklist to inventory of appliances and electronics, and even a "loaned and borrowed" list. One of my favorite parts is the "website logon/password quick reference", as I’ve been needing to get so much of this stuff organized in one place, and this little gem will certainly help me do that.

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I’m Chris and I work full time for my three kids, and part time as a veterinarian. This blog shares a little piece of our world – our homeschooling, 4-H and Youth Crew adventures, my Schoolhouse Review Crew reviews as well as some independent book publisher reviews, my experiences writing and singing with our church’s praise team, and anything else I feel like sharing. It’s my desire to glorify God in everything I do!